Indigenous Sami religion
This chapter deals with what is usually called “indigenous Sami religion”, the most common designation in English of the pre-Christian religious traditions of the Sami.1 In this expression, “indigenous” is the term preferred by the peoples who use the phrase in talking about themselves and who, for example, participate in the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues (UNPFII).
Earlier terms like “primitive” or “non-literate” are, of course, to be avoided.directions, according to the sun, and according to a system where a centre, the tent and the settlement, was opposed to the periphery, which consisted of the areas used for fishing, hunting and reindeer herding near the settlement and the wilderness further away.
Another important aspect is economic variation. Does the information come from hunters and fishermen, from reindeer herders or farmers, from boat builders or smiths, to mention some of the most common sources of livelihood among the Sami during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries?
There are two important aspects of gender variation in particular of which one must be conscious, one being gender differences in the context of rituals and traditions, the other the gender of the informants and of those who collected the sources. Since most of the informants and all the authors of our written sources were men, information about male activities dominates in their texts. However, both in the sources and in much of the scholarly literature, this problem is ignored and what in reality were certain aspects of male activities are presented as “the religion of the Sami”, not as that of (some of) the Sami men. This distorted picture can, however, be corrected, since we are not without information about the women, even if we know much less about their rituals and narratives than about those of the men.
Finally, age differences also have to be taken into account. It was common among the pre-Christian Sami to divide the life of an individual into three main periods: childhood (until puberty), adulthood (until menopause for the women and until the men started to lose their teeth) and old age. Many of the strict rules for behaviour during rituals mentioned in the sources only applied to adults, but not to children or old people. For example, women were probably only forbidden to touch the drum of the ritual specialist (ndejtie) or to come near the sacrificial sites for as long as they were fertile.